Start up: now on email!, video adblocking, Toshiba’s PC loss, iOS 9 for enterprise, and more

Posted on September 16, 2015 by charlesarthur

This is the hamburger menu you’re looking for. Photo by jpellgen on Flickr.

Hey! You can now sign up to receive each day’s The Overspill’s Start Up post by email.
You’ll need to click a confirmation link and then it should all roll on. (We’re still ironing out a few bugs in formatting for mobile but otherwise it’s perfect. Ish.)

A selection of 8 links for you. May contain nuts. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Adblockers hit another market: video » Monday Note

Frederic Filloux:

Using its thorough analytics, YouTube was first to understand that viewers should be given the opportunity to skip videos ads. This markedly increased the value of actually viewed clips.

But the damage is done. With ad blockers, the tragedy is that one bad apple contaminates the whole crate. Once installed, the adblocker will indiscriminately eliminate ads from all sites. The few that were willing to preserve a decent user experience were washed away.

Between April and June 2015, SecretMedia, teaming up with with JW Player, reviewed the data from one billion devices in 42 countries. Here, precautions are warranted: SecretMedia, based in New York, sells an anti-adblocking solution for video; its clients are mainly broadcasters. But even though SecretMedia has a vested interest in darkening the picture, its conclusions are consistent with other surveys in the US and Europe.

The point about the bad apple contaminating the crate is key. Oh well, iOS 9 comes out today – and tons of people will begin deploying adblockers. Let’s watch.
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Mozilla quietly deploys built-in Firebox advertising » ZDNet

Steven Vaughan-Nichols:

Darren Herman, Mozilla’s VP of Content Services, announced in May 2015 that “Suggested Tiles represents an important step for us to improve the state of digital advertising.”

Then, this summer, Mozilla quietly launched Suggested Tiles, the organization’s first commercial ad product. Well, it will be ads. At the moment, Mozilla claims it’s not getting paid for them.

Herman explained, “Since early August, we have been delivering promoted content provided by our first wave of partners including Yahoo, a number of top tier news titles including Fortune Magazine and Quartz, and mission-oriented partners such as the Make-a-Wish Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.”

Not sure that’s going to be popular.
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Random thoughts on the new Apple TV » Medium

Ouriel Ohayon of Appsfire:

Most apps live out of ads. Most apps are Free. What was not said today is whether TV apps will be able to monetize with ads the same way iphone apps are monetized with ads. This is a big deal not just for monetization but also for discovery. Ads are one of the key channels for discovery and if no native ads are allowed in TV apps then the only way to get discovered is via the TV app store: meaning you have zero chance unless featured by Apple. I doubt Apple will completely ignore that question: Ads on TV can be a huge opportunity (including for iAds). They may not be ready for it just yet.

But what that means for app developers: get ready to suffer to get your free TV app (or paid app) discovered and monetized.

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Toshiba loss on weak TV, PC sales boosts case for revamp » Reuters

Makiko Yamazaki:

Toshiba Corp swung to a first-quarter loss on weak PC and TV sales, raising pressure on its new chief executive to speed up a business revamp in addition to improving governance after a $1.3bn accounting scandal.

The laptops-to-nuclear power conglomerate reported an April-June operating loss of 10.96bn yen ($91m) on Monday compared with a ¥47.7bn profit a year earlier.

Specifically looking at the PC business – which is the one under stress – the Toshiba financials say “The Lifestyle Products & Services segment saw significantly lower sales, reflecting significantly lower sales in the Visual Products business, which includes LCD TVs, and the PC business, due to a shift in focus to redefined sales territories and other factors.
The segment as a whole saw deteriorated operating income (loss), reflecting deteriorated operating income in the PC and Home Appliances businesses.”

Specifically, the PC business shrank from a quarterly ¥169.4bn ($1.4bn) a year ago to ¥116.8bn ($970m) in the April-June period. And to a loss. How long can Toshiba’s PC business carry on?
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Apple makes its biggest push to date into the enterprise » Re/code

Sean Ginevan, sr director of strategy, MobileIron:

With iOS 9, Apple is introducing features that will more easily enable IT to control iOS devices and automate provisioning of software. Using iOS 9, an enterprise can provision apps from the App Store silently, and disallow the user from installing their own applications. The operating system also makes it easier to place devices into supervised mode, which enables capabilities like disabling iMessage and locking device settings, round out the abilities to make an iPad Pro more suited to mission-specific tasks enterprise IT wishes to deploy them for…

…Three features have been introduced in iOS 9 that address that issue [of data going to non-managed devices]. The first allows enterprise IT to decide which applications are “managed,” meaning the data within them is owned by IT. Prior to iOS 9, if a user installed a business app from the App Store, then the app was “unmanaged” and could not interact with enterprise data. The user would have to reinstall the app over again through their corporate app storefront to make it managed. Now, enterprise IT can easily flag which apps are managed and reduce the user intervention required.

Second, iOS 9 provides enhanced controls over AirDrop. Prior to iOS 9, the only way to prevent corporate data from being shared with an unauthorized device was to turn off AirDrop completely. Now, enterprises can configure iOS 9 such that managed applications can’t have their data shared out via AirDrop.

Third, Apple decided that “simple passcodes,” will now require a minimum of six characters when a device with TouchID is enabled.

MobileIron is now up against BlackBerry/Good Technology in aiming to manage enterprise iOS devices.
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Hamburger menu, the most recognizable thing on the planet » DeveloperTown

Randy Fisher:

Using eye tracking software, we ran 25 people through a series of tasks to gather viewing data. We used Google Inbox as the test site, but created two different versions that were presented at random. Version 1 was Inbox exactly as it is currently designed today with a hamburger menu, and Version 2 was another version we created with a horizontal menu of the same main menu choices hidden in the hamburger.

What happened next will [pick from menu above]
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Why tablets are the future of computing » WSJ

Christopher Mims:

Take Intel’s coming line of Skylake chips, which CEO Brian Krzanich has said will enable thinner, lighter notebook PCs with better battery life. All of this will be possible because the chips will be more efficient, with some Skylake chips drawing less than 4½ watts, says IT analyst Patrick Moorhead.
“That power envelope is the first time you can do a fanless device, and fanless means thin,” says Mr. Moorhead. In other words, those svelte, MacBook Air-like “ultrabooks” Intel has been touting have the potential to turn into ultra tablets with detachable keyboards.

These devices won’t just be running Windows, of course, because manufacturers also have plans to sell them with Google’s Chrome operating system and even a version of the Android OS modified to function like a full desktop operating system.

What’s just over the horizon is a weird moment in computing history, when every major desktop and mobile OS, with the notable exception of Mac OS, will be competing on devices with the same ultra tablet form factor. With Windows 10, Microsoft has already blurred the lines between a mobile and a desktop OS, and now Google, Apple and others are following suit.

Arguably it should be “why 2-in-1s are the future of computing”, but it would make the headline unwieldy. Does this mean the Ubuntu Edge idea of a mobile phone you plug into a keyboard/display becomes feasible soon? It seems an idea that comes and goes – some times it’s good (Handspring had a good version in the early 2000s), some times it’s bad (Motorola Atrix).
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Notebook retailers in Europe having difficulty clearing inventory » Digitimes

Aaron Lee and Joseph Tsai:

As the year-end holidays approach, the [upstream supply chain] sources are concerned that the retailers may reduce their notebook prices further in order to quickly clear up their inventory, but such a move is expected to greatly impact notebook brand vendors’ profitability and affect overall notebook sales in the second half.

The sources pointed out that brand vendors such as Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have been encouraging their retail partners to stock up since May by offering them high commissions. However, weak demand and Windows 10’s failure to kickstart a PC replacement trend have caused the retailers to suffer from high inventory pileup despite their aggressive promotions.

Acer and Asustek Computer, neither of whom has used the high-commission strategy, are still expected to be affected as the retailers are selling competitors’ notebooks at a much lower price range, forcing the two firms to follow suit or risk losing market shares. Currently, Acer and Asustek take up about 30-40% of Europe’s notebook sales.

Asia Pacific is also seeing weakening notebook demand amid a slowing China economy. The PC market in the US is the only one seeing meaningful growth, but only US-based vendors HP, Dell and Apple will benefit.

I’d guess the “sources” in this story aren’t too far from Asus and Acer.
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Start up: hacked ATMs in Mexico, Cyanogen + Cortana, iPhone forecasts, Apple TV v consoles, and more

Posted on September 15, 2015 by charlesarthur

Content blockers are days away from going live with iOS 9. Photo by Dave Lanovaz on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Wash at 40 degrees. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Should police have the right to take control of self-driving cars? » Techdirt

Karl Bode:

Just how much power should law enforcement have over your self-driving vehicle? Should law enforcement be able to stop a self-driving vehicle if you refuse to? That was a question buried recently in https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2388355/rand-rr928.pdf (pdf) which posits a number of theoretical situations in which law enforcement might find the need for some kind of automobile kill switch:

“The police officer directing traffic in the intersection could see the car barreling toward him and the occupant looking down at his smartphone. Officer Rodriguez gestured for the car to stop, and the self-driving vehicle rolled to a halt behind the crosswalk.

Commissioned by the National Institute of Justice, the RAND report is filled with benign theoreticals like this, and while it briefly discusses some of the obvious problems created by giving law enforcement (and by proxy intelligence agencies) this type of power over vehicle systems and data, it doesn’t offer many solutions.

That’s quite a question. Then again, would you try to make a getaway in an SDC?
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Intelligent machines: Making AI work in the real world » BBC News

Eric Schmidt – you know, the Google guy – wrote a piece for the BBC’s machine learning week. Most of it is blah. Then there’s this bit:

In the next generation of software, machine learning won’t just be an add-on that improves performance a few percentage points; it will really replace traditional approaches.

To give just one example: a decade ago, to launch a digital music service, you probably would have enlisted a handful of elite tastemakers to pick the hottest new music.

Today, you’re much better off building a smart system that can learn from the real world – what actual listeners are most likely to like next – and help you predict who and where the next Adele might be.

As a bonus, it’s a much less elitist taste-making process – much more democratic – allowing everyone to discover the next big star through our own collective tastes and not through the individual preferences of a select few.

This is being taken as a dig at Apple Music with its human-curated lists. Well, sure, but the “radio” function in Apple Music isn’t human-curated. And music choice “democratic”? Isn’t that how it already works?
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iOS dev: why Apple TV is game over for Xbox One and PS4 » Forbes

Dave Thier:

It’s hard to imagine an immediate threat to Microsoft MSFT -0.93% Xbox One and Sony PS4 running games like Halo and Uncharted. But I talked to Jeff Smith, CEO of the popular Karaoke app Smule , and a developer who’s been with the iOS platform since the beginning. He says that Xbox One and PS4 fans shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the Apple TV as a serious gaming contender. The key, he says, is that Apple is a developer-friendly platform, and that means more content, and, as iOS has shown, more quality content as well.

“We think it’s significant if you consider the console market today: it’s been a market where there have been high barriers of entry to get into that market,” Smith says. “You have to get Sony and Microsoft or Nintendo to get you on to the platform, you have to have a custom deal, and they’re all proprietary platforms. With Apple bringing tvOS, which is a subset of iOS, onto a console-like platform, we think it lowers the barrier of entry. And I think you’ll see a lot more developers on the console market than ever before.”

Suitably overdone headline, but it’s certainly a mistake to dismiss the Apple TV out of hand. It has an install base of 25m, which isn’t much (the PS3 and Xbox 360 are at about 70m, the PS4 and Xbox One rather less so far), but the next version will attract a lot more people. And you don’t need to pay to put a game on iOS.
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Tracking a Bluetooth skimmer gang in Mexico » Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

“–Sept. 9, 12:30 p.m. CT, Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico: Halfway down the southbound four-lane highway from Cancun to the ancient ruins in Tulum, traffic inexplicably slowed to a halt. There was some sort of checkpoint ahead by the Mexican Federal Police. I began to wonder whether it was a good idea to have brought along the ATM skimmer instead of leaving it in the hotel safe. If the cops searched my stuff, how could I explain having ultra-sophisticated Bluetooth ATM skimmer components in my backpack?”

The above paragraph is an excerpt that I pulled from the body of Part II in this series of articles and video essays stemming from a recent four-day trip to Mexico. During that trip, I found at least 19 different ATMs that all apparently had been hacked from the inside and retrofitted with tiny, sophisticated devices that store and transmit stolen card data and PINs wirelessly.

In June 2015, I heard from a source at an ATM firm who wanted advice and help in reaching out to the right people about what he described as an ongoing ATM fraud campaign of unprecedented sophistication, organization and breadth. Given my focus on ATM skimming technology and innovations, I was immediately interested.

Krebs gets up to some amazing jaunts.
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Google found guilty of ‘abusing dominant market position’ in Russia » WSJ

Olga Razumovskaya and Alistair Barr:

Google has been found guilty in a rapid Russian antitrust probe, a spokesperson for the country’s antitrust regulator told The Wall Street Journal.

In February, Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service opened a probe into Google for alleged anticompetitive practices related to how the company bundles apps with its Android mobile operating system.

The company was found guilty of “abusing its dominant market position,” but not of “unfair competition practices,” the regulator told The Wall Street Journal.

The Russian agency will have 10 business days to issue its ruling on the case in full. “We haven’t yet received the ruling,“ Google’s Russia spokeswoman said. “When we do, we will study it and determine our next steps.”

Form an orderly queue behind the EC, Canada and the rest, please, Russia. Also, how do you have dominance abuse but not unfair competition?
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Cortana on Cyanogen: CEO Kirt McMaster on building the next great smartphone OS » IB Times

David Gilbert:

Cyanogen has not announced any partnerships with hardware manufacturers beyond what is already on the market, but to really reach the masses, it will have to partner with a well-known name – and for companies like Sony, HTC and LG, all struggling to make Android work, Cyanogen could be an enticing option.

Of course, with Microsoft’s Lumia range failing to capture any significant market share since the company bought Nokia’s mobile phone division, it, too, could be on the lookout for something new.

While McMaster tells it like it is about Microsoft’s smartphone woes, he says Microsoft is still a great company and builds great services, one of which is going to be key in building the next version of Cyanogen – and that is Cortana.

Microsoft’s digital personal assistant has grown significantly since it began life on the company’s smartphones and this summer had its biggest update to date when it was deeply integrated into Windows 10 and Microsoft’s Edge browser.

McMaster revealed that Cyanogen is working with Microsoft to deeply integrate Cortana into the next version of Cyanogen OS. This is key to catapulting Cyanogen into the mass market, he asserts: Cortana is currently available as an app on Android, but in order for it to make a real difference, it needs to be able to be integrated at the OS level so that its full potential can be leveraged.

So how would that work in a phone running Google services? Wouldn’t Cortana and ‘OK Google’ fight like cats in a sack?
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Next up: iPhone preorder sales data » BTIG Research

Walter Piecyk:

The focus of investors is squarely on the number of phones that can be sold over the next three and a half months. Our estimate is that it can sell 80 million units in the December quarter versus a consensus view that expects little to no growth this year. We believe 3D touch is a much bigger deal that many think and wrote about that and our hands-on experience with all of Apple’s new products. (Link). Of course the bigger issue is that 70% of existing iPhone users are carrying 5s or older models, of which the 6 and 6S models are big upgrades. As we have discussed in the past, the lower hurdles to upgrade those phones in the United States could be a key driver of sales.

Last year at this time Apple shipped 74.5m phones; only Samsung has previously shipped 80m or more smartphones in a quarter (which it’s done four times).

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Hands on with three iOS 9 content blockers: 1Blocker, Blockr and Crystal » TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

ahead of iOS 9’s release, a number of companies and indie developers have been building content blockers of their own and testing them out with iOS 9’s sizable group of beta testers.

While many consumers will likely gravitate toward AdBlock Plus because of their familiarity with the brand’s name and reputation, there will be a good handful of new apps on the horizon as well, which are also worth a look.

As she says, you can choose from super-twiddly, a bit twiddly, and simple. I’d bet that simple will actually be the one people pick.

Meanwhile…
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Advertisers complain about format & approval obstacles with iOS 9’s News app » Apple Insider

Roger Fingas:

Although publishers like CNN, Time, and Vox are making most of their content available in the app, some are said to be planning to offer a few dozen stories a day at most. Standouts in that sense include companies that depend on paid subscription models, such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Some ad executives have complained that common tools like real-time placement bidding aren’t in place for the News launch, and that Apple is requiring 48 hours notice before approving a campaign. The company is also allegedly demanding that pre-roll ads before video segments get their own approval.

Apple is moreover refusing to support Google’s DoubleClick ad platform. Edward Kim, a member of the online marketing company SimpleReach, argued to the Post that Apple is attempting to use News to build up iAd. That platform has struggled to gain ground in a market dominated by Google — whereas Google ads can reach virtually any device, iAd is unusable in some key spaces, like Android.

“Real-time placement bidding” is what quickly leads to malware and “bounce you out to App Store install” ads.
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Google reveals plans to increase production of self-driving cars » The Guardian

Mark Harris (who has done so much great original reporting on this topic):

[Sarah] Hunter [head of Google X] also shared new details about how the existing driverless prototypes work. “All [the car] has is a ‘go’ button, a ‘please slow down and stop’ button and a ‘stop pretty quickly’ button,” she said. “The intention is that the passenger gets in the vehicle, says into microphone, take me to Safeway, and the car does the entire journey.”

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Google’s self-driving cars currently require highly detailed maps of the areas they’re operating in, with centimetre accuracy of road features like lanes, roundabouts and traffic lights. They are also limited to 25mph so that Google could get them on to public roads without expensive and time-consuming crash tests. Even more importantly, they need safety drivers able to take control back in an instant if the system malfunctions. California is slowly working on regulations that will pave the way for the operation of completely driverless vehicles by the public.

All of this means that Google is unlikely to move its self-driving technology into full production any time soon. “We haven’t decided yet how we’re going to bring this to market,” admitted Hunter. “Right now, our engineers are trying to figure out … how to make a car genuinely drive itself. Once we figure that out, we’ll figure out how to bring it to market and in which way. Is it something that we manufacture at scale for sale to individuals? Or is it something that we own and operate as a service?”

Is it a taxi, a bus or an owned device? Seems trivial; actually gets to the heart of what a “car” is.
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Start up: Samsung Pay to win?, Apple on Siri/Photos privacy, mystery ministry mujahadeen hack, and more

Posted on September 14, 2015 by charlesarthur

Scanning the content is only half the battle. Photo by JonathanCohen on Flickr.

A selection of 12 links for you. Not valid in Montana. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Lockpickers 3D print TSA master luggage keys from leaked photos » WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

If you have sensitive keys—say, a set of master keys that can open locks you’ve asked millions of Americans to use—don’t post pictures of them on the Internet.

A group of lock-picking and security enthusiasts drove that lesson home Wednesday by publishing a set of CAD files to Github that anyone can use to 3-D print a precisely measured set of the TSA’s master keys for its “approved” locks—the ones the agency can open with its own keys during airport inspections. Within hours, at least one 3-D printer owner had already downloaded the files, printed one of the master keys, and published a video proving that it opened his TSA-approved luggage lock.

Those photos first began making the rounds online last month, after the Washington Post unwittingly published (and then quickly deleted) a photo of the master keys in an article about the “secret life” of baggage in the hands of the TSA. It was too late.

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Samsung Pay: the mobile wallet winner? » Mobile Payments Today

Will Hernandez:

During a panel discussion about the current state of ATMs, bitcoin, and mobile wallets, ATM Industry Association CEO Mike Lee unapologetically threw his support behind Samsung Pay as the mobile wallet that will “win.”

Lee’s Samsung Pay endorsement can be boiled down to a single feature that is supposed to separate it from other mobile wallet providers: magnetic secure transmission technology support on the device itself.

Samsung acquired the rights to the technology when it bought LoopPay earlier this year, and has since embedded it into Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge smartphones. The devices still rely on NFC chips to enable users to conduct tap-and-pay transactions at contactless-enabled point-of-sale terminals. Should contactless be unavailable, MST can “communicate” with the magnetic stripe reader currently present on all terminals in the United States. Samsung Pay will sense which option is available and transact accordingly.

But whether MST is really that true game changer in the industry remains to be seen.

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Apple addresses privacy questions about ‘Hey Siri’ and Live Photo features » TechCrunch

Matt Panzarino:

With ‘Hey Siri’, “In no case is the device recording what the user says or sending that information to Apple before the feature is triggered,” says Apple.

Instead, audio from the microphone is continuously compared against the model, or pattern, of your personal way of saying ‘Hey Siri’ that you recorded during setup of the feature. Hey Siri requires a match to both the ‘general’ Hey Siri model (how your iPhone thinks the words sound) and the ‘personalized’ model of how you say it. This is to prevent other people’s voices from triggering your phone’s Hey Siri feature by accident.

Until that match happens, no audio is ever sent off of your iPhone. All of that listening and processing happens locally.

Live Photos:

Because Live Photos record motion before your still image, they are continuously buffered beginning the moment you open your camera app and see the Live icon (orange circle) at the top of your screen. Apple says that this 1.5 second recording only happens when the camera is on, and this information is not permanently saved until you take a picture, period.

“Although the camera is “recording” while you’re in Live Photo mode, the device will not save the 1.5 seconds before until you press the camera button,” says Apple. “The pre-captured images are not saved to the user’s device nor are they sent off the device.”

The 1.5 seconds after the still capture are also recorded because you’ve tapped the camera button in live mode.

From what we’ve gleaned, Live Photos are a single 12-megapixel image and a paired motion format file, likely a .mov. They are presented together by iOS but are actually separate entities tied to one another.

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With iOS 9, ‘Hey Siri’ gains a new setup process tailored to your voice » Apple Insider

“Appleinsider Staff”:

Setting up “Hey Siri” is a simple, five-step process where users must speak a number of commands. If the iPhone or iPad does not properly hear the user, they are instructed to speak again.

Users say the words “Hey Siri” three times, then “Hey Siri, how’s the weather today?” followed by “Hey Siri, it’s me.” Once this is completed, iOS 9 informs the user that “Hey Siri” is ready to use.

Previously, in iOS 8, “Hey Siri” was enabled without a setup process. On occasion, the voice-initiated function would not work properly and took multiple tries. Presumably Apple’s new setup process will address some of those issues from iOS 8.

Smart to personalise it, if that is what this is. I’ve had Siri go off while plugged in and the radio’s on: stories about Syria tend to be the cause. Not sure this will help any iPhone-owning newsreaders, though.
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App Programming Guide for tvOS: On-Demand Resources » Apple Developer Documents

On-demand resources are app contents that are hosted on the App Store and are separate from the related app bundle that you download. They enable smaller app bundles, faster downloads, and richer app content. The app requests sets of on-demand resources, and the operating system manages downloading and storage. The app uses the resources, and then releases the request. After downloading, the resources may stay on the device through multiple launch cycles, making access even faster.

Each app stored on Apple TV is limited to a maximum of 200MB. In order to create an app greater than this amount, you must break up your app into downloadable bundles. In Xcode, create tags and attach them to the required resources. When your app requests the resources associated with a tag, the operating system downloads only the required assets. You must wait until the assets are downloaded before you can use them in your app.

So many people saw the headline that each app is limited to 200MB and thought that that is the upper limit for everything related to an app on AppleTV. As this clearly says, it isn’t – and note also that point about “After downloading, the resources may stay on the device through multiple launch cycles, making access even faster.”

But reading dev documents takes effort. Tweeting “200MB OMG” is much simpler.
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Whatever happened to Google Books? » The New Yorker

Tim Wu on the project that has been stalled since 2011:

There are plenty of ways to attribute blame in this situation. If Google was, in truth, motivated by the highest ideals of service to the public, then it should have declared the project a non-profit from the beginning, thereby extinguishing any fears that the company wanted to somehow make a profit from other people’s work. Unfortunately, Google made the mistake it often makes, which is to assume that people will trust it just because it’s Google. For their part, authors and publishers, even if they did eventually settle, were difficult and conspiracy-minded, particularly when it came to weighing abstract and mainly worthless rights against the public’s interest in gaining access to obscure works. Finally, the outside critics and the courts were entirely too sanguine about killing, as opposed to improving, a settlement that took so many years to put together, effectively setting the project back a decade if not longer.

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Who controls the off switch? » Light Blue Touchpaper

Ross Anderson (who leads some of the UK’s best academic security researchers:

We have a new paper on the strategic vulnerability created by the plan to replace Britain’s 47 million meters with smart meters that can be turned off remotely. The energy companies are demanding this facility so that customers who don’t pay their bills can be switched to prepayment tariffs without the hassle of getting court orders against them. If the Government buys this argument – and I’m not convinced it should – then the off switch had better be closely guarded. You don’t want the nation’s enemies to be able to turn off the lights remotely, and eliminating that risk could just conceivably be a little bit more complicated than you might at first think. (This paper follows on from our earlier paper On the security economics of electricity metering at WEIS 2010.)

Anderson doesn’t need to scare people for money. But what he points to is often worrisome.
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Cabinet ministers’ email hacked by Isil spies » Telegraph

So this is how modern media – well, I use the word “modern” in its loosest sense – works. Writing this story took four journalists, so please stand up, Claire Newell, Edward Malnick, Lyndsey Telford and Luke Heighton, for this 22-paragraph story which begins:

Jihadists in Syria have hacked into ministerial email accounts in a sophisticated espionage operation uncovered by GCHQ, the Telegraph can disclose.

I know! Blimey, you think. Hacked in to their accounts? They must have found a ton of stuff there, right?

You then plough on through tons of paragraphs about drone strikes and various bits of handwaving, but no detail. You carry on, and eventually – in the 13th paragraph – there’s this:

The recent cyber threat first emerged in a warning to Whitehall security officials in May and it is understood that the plans to attack Britain were exposed by the GCHQ investigation.

It is unclear what information the extremists were able to access, but it is understood that no security breaches occurred. However, officials were told to tighten security procedures, including changing passwords.

And that’s it. No more detail. So what do we think actually happened? Based on this very thin gruel, my guess is that the ministerial email had two-factor authentication, and someone got phished, and it set all sorts of alarm off in Cheltenham (where GCHQ is). No breach, but someone had been very stupid.

And of course “hacked” in the headline is overplayed. “Targeted” might work. Classic Sunday journalism: no paper will be able to follow this up for a Monday story, because there aren’t any facts to it. The story falls apart in your hands.
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Ten years later, this is how Techmeme has avoided clickbait, autoplay ads, and more » LinkedIn

Gabe Rivera, the site’s chief executive and frequent editor:

In 2015, supporting an online news operation with advertising when your page view and unique visitor numbers aren’t massive is always an uphill battle. Media sites in this predicament are often tempted to run ads units that pay more but repel and infuriate readers.

Fortunately what Techmeme does have is the attention of the people who lead the tech industry. (Ask your CEO “where do you get your tech news?”) When a news destination is a hub for industry decision-makers, companies will want to reach its readers, making it possible to sell the far more welcome form of “ads” that Techmeme does include. These include posts from sponsors’ blogs, catchy taglines from companies that want you to check out their job openings, and events that companies want you to consider attending. While not all companies are used to making these sorts of marketing buys, many are learning how, and Techmeme is here to serve them.

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FBI says ‘Australian IS jihadist’ is actually a Jewish American troll named Joshua Ryne Goldberg » Brisbane Times

Elise Potaka and Luke McMahon:

The Australi Witness persona fooled members of the international intelligence community as well as journalists, with well-known analyst Rita Katz of SITE Intelligence Group saying the “IS supporter” held a “prestige” position in online jihadi circles and was “part of the hard core of a group of individuals who constantly look for targets for other people to attack”.

Ms Katz has previously acted as a consultant for US and foreign governments and testified before Congress on online terrorist activities.

The Australian Federal Police were unaware of Australi Witness’s real identity as Goldberg until contacted by journalists working on behalf of Fairfax Media.

On the internet, nobody knows you’re a troll.
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Why Xbox Kinect didn’t take off » Business Insider

Matt Weinberger:

The Kinect also introduced voice commands and a gesture interface to the Xbox 360 itself. You could pause a movie with your voice, or log in to your account on the console by standing in front of the camera.

But as cool as that all sounded, the Kinect was still a new technology, and there were some glitches with those cool new interface tricks.

“It does do magic, but only 85% correctly. When you encounter the 15%, it’s frustrating,” the former Xbox insider said.

Serious gamers care about precise movements, like landing a perfect Super Combo in “Street Fighter IV” or nailing a headshot in “Call of Duty.” Similarly, if you have voice controls for a movie, it had better work the first time, or else you’re just shouting “pause” at your TV over and over.

In both cases, it wasn’t quite the totally accurate experience that people wanted.

“It’s essentially a less precise replacement for a lot of things which, once the novelty wears off, is not valued by the market. So it’s real value is for new experiences impossible before without it. There isn’t enough interest or investment in those,” the ex-insider says.

Worse, the longer people used Kinect, the more they found places and situations where it just fell short and didn’t work as well as it should have.

In my apartment, playing a Kinect game requires moving furniture around to give the sensor the field of view that it needs to work well. It’s a big problem for lots of gamers, since you need 6 to 10 feet between you and the sensor.

Try playing that in a dorm room or small apartment.

Yes, precisely.
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iPad Pro won’t replace the PC any time soon » Teschspective

Tony Bradley:

Perhaps the biggest change that has occurred over the past few years that makes the iPad Pro viable as a potential PC replacement is Microsoft. The shift in strategy by Microsoft to embrace the cross-platform ecosystem and make Microsoft Office and other key Microsoft products available across rival devices removes one of the biggest obstacles for the iPad as a laptop replacement. Microsoft was at the Apple event this week and stood on stage to reveal that it has improved apps developed specifically for iOS 9 and the iPad Pro that will make Microsoft Office arguably better on the iPad Pro than it is on a standard Windows PC or even on the Surface Pro 3 itself.

The flip side of that, though, is that the iPad Pro still runs iOS. It is still primarily a mobile device trying to be a PC—whereas the Surface Pro tablet is a PC trying to be a mobile device. Not much has changed since my experience using the iPad as a laptop replacement for 30 days. It is still a suitable device for a limited range of tasks and applications. It still won’t work as well as a traditional PC for a number of specific functions.

More importantly—at least as it relates to the ability of the iPad Pro to compete with Windows PCs in a business environment—it can’t run the software that organizations have already invested in and rely on to get things done.

Thus you have the bear (pessimist) case on the iPad Pro. But it’s that last sentence which betrays the flaw in the argument. Lots of organisations can’t get the new things done they want to on older systems. An iPad begins as a mobile device; the Surface yearns to be a laptop (just look at its screen ratio).
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Start up: Uber’s China fight, Stagefright goes public, women and Apple, Wileyfox reviewed, and more

Posted on September 11, 2015 by charlesarthur

Feast your eyes: you’ll never see its like again. (Hopefully.) Photo by MarkGregory007 on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Inside Uber’s fight with its Chinese nemesis, Didi Kuaidi » WSJ

Fabulous in-depth piece by Eva Dou and Rick Carew:

Both companies have sought to woo drivers with bonuses to those who rack up rides. Uber has offered larger bonuses in an effort to catch up in scale, earlier this year giving as much as 7,000 yuan weekly to Beijing drivers who completed a high number of rides—quadruple a traditional taxi driver’s wages, according to drivers. Both companies have bonuses for individual rides during peak times and smaller bonuses for individual achievements, such as referring friends or getting high ratings.

Now the challenge for both is keeping drivers and riders while weaning them off bonuses and coupons.

Yang Yang, a 33-year-old Uber driver in Beijing, says bonuses are increasingly difficult to get. He stays on the road 12 to 14 hours a day to qualify for the weekly bonus, using minty salves to stay awake.

The lure of bonuses has led drivers to game the system. Uber and Didi Kuaidi battle drivers who book fake rides—known as “brushing” in China. In brushing, the scammer will typically pose as both driver and rider, essentially paying himself multiple times to build up enough fake business to win a bonus.

Rings of scammers use specialized software bought online to rack up fake rides while they sit at home, drivers interviewed say. They say they get calls and texts from people offering to help them scam Uber for a fee. Didi Kuaidi is suffering less from the problem, according to drivers, as its lower driver bonuses are less of a draw.

I love how people find ways to game systems like this; it’s the thing that definitely keeps us a step ahead of the damn robots.
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The Washington Post has begun blocking the ad blockers » BuzzFeed News

Matthew Zeitlin:

“Many people already receive our journalism for free online, with digital advertising paying only a portion of the cost,” a Washington Post spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.

“Without income via subscriptions or advertising, we are unable to deliver the journalism that people coming to our site expect from us. We are currently running a test using a few different approaches to see what moves these readers to either enable ads on The Washington Post, or subscribe.”

There’s a kind of Cold War brewing between publishers who say that ad blocking software cuts off the lifeblood of free media online, and readers who complain about pages crammed with garish ads and intrusive trackers, which make many sites bloated and slow to load.

Not sure it’s a cold war. It’s about to get a lot more heated: iOS 9 comes out next week, and the content blocking apps will all be lining up for it.
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Android Stagefright exploit code released to public » Threatpost

Michael Mimoso:

[Joshua] Drake, vice president of platform research and exploitation at Zimperium zLabs, said in July the bug could affect more than 950m Android devices. He chose not to publish exploit code at the time, giving Google time to push patches to the Android Open Source Project and subsequently to handset manufacturers and carriers. He originally planned to release exploit code on Aug. 24.

Google, meanwhile, wasted no time in changing the way it releases security updates for Android, announcing at Black Hat that it would send monthly over-the-air updates its Nexus phones. The move was mirrored by others, including Samsung and LG, and the first Nexus updates included patches for Stagefright. Silent Circle also patched its Blackphone and Mozilla patched Firefox, which uses Stagefright code in the browser.

Stagefright is the name of the media playback engine native to Android, and the vulnerabilities Drake discovered date back to version 2.2; devices older than Jelly Bean (4.2) are especially at risk since they lack exploit mitigations such as Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) that are present in newer versions of Android.

The problem is that Stagefright is an over-privileged application with system access on some devices, which enables privileges similar to apps with root access.

When the tide goes out, you discover who’s been swimming naked, or hasn’t put on their security trousers.
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Focusing on the full picture with data » FlowingData

Nathan Yau:

I don’t know the full context of this discussion, but in the interview below, Hans Rosling talks to media person Adam Holm about why we shouldn’t use the media to form our opinions about the world. Media person disputes. Rosling puts foot on table and says Holm is wrong.

This is terrific. Enjoy.

Rosling also gave a TED talk in 2014: “How not to be ignorant about the world“.
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Wileyfox Swift: Brit startup budget ‘droid is the mutt’s nuts » The Register

Alun Taylor:

If someone asked me what my ideal smartphone would be I’d say one that costs no more than £120, has 16GB of storage, at least 2GB of RAM, a 5-inch IPS screen, a removable battery, two SIM slots, space for a microSD card, the best iteration of Android available (that’s the Cyanogen OS Android fork, in my opinion) and is waterproof.

There’s nothing revolutionary about the Swift’s design, it’s just smart and well made
Wileyfox’s new Swift actually fails to meet two of those criteria – the cost is £130, and there’s no waterproofing. But as we’ll see, considering the rest of the package, it’s very easy to forgive those two failings.

In an increasingly competitive market the Swift is up against the likes of the Motorola Moto G and Sony Xperia M4 Aqua, both of which we have reviewed recently. And both of which are rather more expensive at £189 (for the 2GB RAM version) and £199 respectively.

Along with price deflation, Android is splitting into niches, as well as software specialisation – such as the use of Cyanogen here. This is great value; it’s not going to sell in huge volumes (simply because of supply chain constraints) but it’s where the Android market is going.
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Bullshit, selfies and Photoshopped smiles: Apple’s iPhone 6S announcement was a joke » Gadgette

Holly Brockwell is pissed off and she isn’t going to take it any more:

It’s no secret that I’m far from Apple’s biggest fan. In fact, despite what Reddit seems to think, I’m firmly Team Android. But that doesn’t mean I don’t give Apple credit where it’s due – it’s just that it seems to be due less and less these days. Last night’s announcement was their worst yet.

Her principal complaint seems to be “these things have all been done before!” along with “there was a Photoshop demo using a woman’s face!”. The “where were the women?” thing seemed to become a mini-meme on Twitter. Perhaps I was missing the bit where Jen Folse came out and demoed Apple TV entirely on her own. Or where a female doctor showed off the iPad Pro, again, entirely on her own. Or a female entrepreneur from Gilt showed what she could do on Apple TV. Sure, there were more men. But that’s true in pretty much any tech event.

My wife constantly quotes a friend says you can divide the world into drains and radiators – some suck you dry, some warm you up. I prefer radiators. Which is why I love this tweet from Lia Napolitano, who used to work on the Apple TV team, praising Folse, who still does.

You guys. Check out Jen Folse's Siri nail art. #womeninpower #womenindesign pic.twitter.com/EldZkI0yuG

— Lia Napolitano (@napolisaurusrex) September 10, 2015

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Production of new 21-inch iMac begins, say Taiwan makers » Digitimes

Aaron Lee and Joseph Tsai:

Production of a new 21-inch iMac featuring a 4096 by 2304 screen kicked off in early September and will be launched in the fourth quarter, with shipments in the quarter estimated at 1.4m-1.5m units, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers.

With shipments from existing iMac products, Apple’s overall all-in-one PC shipments could surpass those of Lenovo in the second half.

The sources pointed out that the new 21-inch iMac only has a limited change in industrial design, but is upgraded with better hardware specifications, especially the Ultra HD display.

This will probably be no more than a press release from Apple. The current 21in iMac is 1920 by 1080 pixels – so this is going to be an amazing screen.
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Amazon finally stops selling the Fire Phone, as company adjusts its hardware strategy » GeekWire

Tricia Duryee:

It’s taken more than a year, but Amazon has finally exhausted its supply of Fire Phones.

At least that appears to be the case based on the phone’s product page, which now lists the device as “currently unavailable,” with an additional note in the buy box, stating: “We don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock.”

That’s true for both the 32GB and 64GB models.

A year ago I calculated that no more than 35,000 had been sold. I wonder what the final number was.
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Electronic noise is drowning out the Internet of Things » IEEE Spectrum

Mark McHenry, Dennis Roberson and Robert Matheson:

it is expensive to trace RF [radio frequency] pollution to a source and, when you do, it is often challenging to get offenders to stop offending.

The coming Internet of Things is going to make things worse. Much worse. It will do so by adding complex RF-control chips to countless common devices, like door locks, light switches, appliances of every type, our cars, and maybe even our bodies, which will enable them to connect to the Internet. Each of these chips is a potential source of noise. Plenty of technological fixes are available, of course, but the huge number of chips means that manufacturers will be more reluctant to add costly shielding and other noise-muffling features to their products. Silence is golden: It costs money to get it.

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Apple promo video confirms the 6s has a smaller battery » TechCrunch

Fitz Teppper:

a 3D Touch promotional video released by the company seems to confirm that the 6s will indeed have a smaller battery than the iPhone 6. Specifically, GSMArena discovered that the video shows a shot of the battery marked “1715 mAh”, which is less than the iPhone 6’s 1810 mAh battery.

The extra space gained from reducing the device’s battery is most likely being used to fit new, larger components like the Taptic Engine and Force Touch-enabled display.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean the device will provide fewer hours of usage. In fact, Apple’s specs on the 6s show that the device will have the exact same talk, Internet browsing, and video playback time as its predecessor. This is most likely due to increased power efficiency in the new phone.

In my (beta) experience, iOS 9 has better battery life than iOS 8. Have to see how the rest of it plays out. Safe bet though that “smaller battery!” will be found in the comments sections of many blogs in the days – months even – to come.
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Start up: how 3D Touch was made (and what it’s like), adblock wars redux, why PC makers want gamers, and more

Posted on September 10, 2015 by charlesarthur

“What’s the call quality like?” LG’s next big growth market. Photo by stevec77 on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple TV Pre-Reprecussions » iLike.code

Nat Brown:

Apple TV will draw more people to gaming on televisions, so “television-based gaming” as a category will grow due to Apple TV in the near term. Consoles will continue to meet a very clear consumer demand for higher-end gaming using gamepads, though many independent game developers and even high-end publishers will abandon lagging consoles over time for the less restrictive Apple TV market as the Apple TV silicon matures, and for PC gaming on Steam (and with luck on Windows). If Apple introduces a gamepad or has a strong attach rate for third-party MFi gamepads, I expect a lot of current console buyers will within a few years find Apple TV’s performance, price-point and more appealing catalog of gamepad content their choice over the next Microsoft or Sony consoles, if those even get built.

Very true in the US, where Apple TV has more of a role (because box sets without ads sure beat the crap TV with ads) but less so in countries like the UK, I think.
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LG Electronics looks to washing machines to keep spinning profits » WSJ

Min Jeong-Lee:

just as Samsung Electronics Co. and Sony Corp. have become more dependent on other business areas like components rather than mobile devices, LG is looking to its less-glamorous appliances’ unit to secure modest-but-steady profit growth.

“The mobile and TV businesses tend to have a lot of ups and downs. The home appliance business, meanwhile, is less vulnerable to swings,” Jo Seong-jin, LG’s home-appliance chief, said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal.

LG’s revenue for appliances—based on local currency value—is up about 13% so far this year, and operating profit margins in the division of about 4.5% to 6% will be “attainable” this year, he said. While far short of the double-digit margins enjoyed by Apple Inc., those levels will outshine LG’s other key business units and that of Samsung’s appliances unit, analysts say.

Washing machines. Washing machines.
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How are artists actually using Apple Music Connect? » Musically

Stuart Dredge looked at some data from the past 10 weeks:

What are they posting? Two kinds of posts seem to be dominating Connect: photos – often cross-posted from Instagram, which suggests that artists (or often their social teams) think Instagram’s visual aesthetic and Apple’s new social service. And secondly promotional messages: encouraging fans to stream songs or albums on Apple Music, pre-order albums on iTunes, or – in the case of artists who are involved with the Beats 1 radio station – posts about their shows.

What’s missing, so far, is the kind of exclusive, engaging stuff promised at the Apple Music launch. In June, Apple’s services boss Eddy Cue said that Pharrell Williams would be posting photos, lyrics and raw mixes of songs – but at the time of writing, he’s posted a single photo two months ago.

Connect isn’t a ghost town: based on the iTunes and Facebook-based lists above, if you followed 30 popular artists on Apple Music, your Connect feed would have between 24 and 33 new posts a week – or 3-5 a day. That might actually be a nicely-manageable complement to the information blur on Twitter and Facebook IF the updates were more than just promotional messages and reposted photos.

It’s still early days, and I’d expect Apple to be working hard to encourage artists not just to use Connect, but to use it well, in the months ahead. As things stand, it is not delivering on its potential. But that potential is there.

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iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus first look: Hands-on with 3D Touch » IB Times

Me! I was there:

on the new models, which go on sale on 25 September in 12 countries including the UK, a hard press on an icon generates a subtle “tap” against the fingers holding the phone.

If the app can do something, you feel a single tap on your fingers, and a menu pops up; if it can’t (because it hasn’t been enabled, or the options don’t make sense) there’s a subtler triple tap, and nothing happens.

It needs a quite different approach from the normal “delete” push; you have to intend to make it happen. In the few minutes I was able to try it out, I quickly got used to the difference – which is helped by the haptic feedback. Practice would likely make perfect, or at least more familiar.

The “left-hand-side” press is not easy at first – it’s a sort of push-and-roll for the thumb. The process for getting the haptic pop is simpler. It’s not the sort of thing you’d find by accident in a hurry, though.

I also wrote hands-on for the iPad Pro and Apple TV; check the IB Times site for those later today (Thursday).
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How Apple built 3D Touch » Bloomberg

Josh Tyrangiel gets the sort of prebrief/access that you’ll recall the New Yorker got a year back:

in lieu of the usual polite deflection, Federighi picked up an iPhone 6S and explained one of 3D Touch’s simpler challenges: “It starts with the idea that, on a device this thin, you want to detect force. I mean, you think you want to detect force, but really what you’re trying to do is sense intent. You’re trying to read minds. And yet you have a user who might be using his thumb, his finger, might be emotional at the moment, might be walking, might be laying on the couch. These things don’t affect intent, but they do affect what a sensor [inside the phone] sees. So there are a huge number of technical hurdles. We have to do sensor fusion with accelerometers to cancel out gravity—but when you turn [the device] a different way, we have to subtract out gravity. … Your thumb can read differently to the touch sensor than your finger would. That difference is important to understanding how to interpret the force. And so we’re fusing both what the force sensor is giving us with what the touch sensor is giving us about the nature of your interaction. So down at even just the lowest level of hardware and algorithms—I mean, this is just one basic thing. And if you don’t get it right, none of it works.”

It’s a great article that (especially if read with the New Yorker one) gives you an increasingly clear view of how Apple’s design process works.
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Analyst suggests this may be the last big iPhone launch » PC Retail

Dominic Sacco:

Argus Insights CEO John Feland predicts that “Apple has one good cycle left in them, barring any earth shattering innovations”.

“This upcoming round of iPhones is likely to be the iPhone’s Farewell tour,” he said. “Market demand of future handsets will not be as high because the innovation pipeline has apparently run out of good (compelling enough for consumers to upgrade) ideas.

“iPhone sales are unlikely to hit the same peaks at next year’s upgrade cycle as the level of smartphone saturation tips to replacement over new users.

Noted for future reference. He’s certainly right about saturation, but the odd thing about saturation is that in theory it means you have more people who could upgrade at any given time than in an unsaturated market.
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Samsung to cut 10% of head office staff, Economic Daily says » Bloomberg Business

Jungah Lee:

Samsung is targeting workers in the human resources, public relations and finance departments, Korea Economic Daily reported Tuesday, citing people it didn’t identify. The Suwon, South Korea-based company also plans to cut some expenses next year, the report added. Samsung declined to comment in an e-mail.

The moves come after new high-end Galaxy smartphones failed to impress consumers, triggering five straight monthly declines and wiping out more than $40bn in Samsung’s market value since April. The company’s share of global smartphone shipments fell more than 3 percentage points in the second quarter, and it’s no longer the top seller in China, the world’s biggest mobile-phone market.

“Cutting jobs is the easiest way to control costs and Samsung’s spending on mobile business could also be more tightly controlled,” said Chung Chang Won, an analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc. in Seoul. “Samsung’s preparing to tighten its belt as it isn’t likely see rapid profit growth in the years to come.”

Subsequently, Samsung has denied this, saying a number of employees are being “relocated”. To their homes?
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After selling his company to Google, this man now wants to block ad-blockers » VentureBeat

Paul Sawer:

While [Ben] Barokas was cagey about the specifics of how the technology works, he did refer to a blurring of lines between ads and publishers’ content.

“There are many nuances, but at a high level our platform makes it harder for ad-block software to distinguish advertising from content,” he said. “We believe we can recover pretty much any advertising that exists today. We have started with direct-sold brand campaigns because they tend to be of higher value to publishers and higher quality to users.”

Barokas said that dozens of ComScore 500 publishers are currently using the platform, but he didn’t reveal any specific details yet regarding the uptake of Sourcepoint, other than that demand has been “overwhelming,” far-exceeding its most optimistic projections.

I was discussing this topic on Twitter the other day and it occurred to me that advertising is a classic example where those who consume aren’t the customer. Advertisers buy space with publishers, but the people to whom those ads are shown aren’t involved in the transaction. This means there’s no way for them – that’s you and I, the readers – to show our displeasure except via adblocking. (A similar disconnect occurred when Microsoft was trying to displace the iPod: it sold music for enabling Windows Media music playback to Windows Media music player makers, not to listeners. That breaks the feedback loop.)

In that sense, adblocking is peoples’ way of speaking up in the transaction. It’s somewhat all-or-nothing, though.
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The PC industry is betting big on gamers » The Verge

Vlad Savov:

The PC gaming market produced $21.5 billion in hardware sales last year, according to data from Jon Peddie Research, which is more than double the revenues derived from console sales. More notably, unlike the broader PC market, which continues shrinking, gaming PC sales are projected to increase over the next couple of years. The JPR analysis suggests the biggest chunk of gaming PC revenue — somewhere in the vicinity of 44% — comes from the so-called enthusiast segment, which the researchers identify as “very performance and style oriented, much like sports car owners.”

Sports car PCs are exactly what we saw from the big manufacturers at IFA. Acer’s Predators, whether it be on the desktop or in the form of pseudo-portable laptops, ape Lamborghini’s angular shapes and aggressive motifs throughout. Asus, with its Republic of Gamers sub-brand, does the very same. From overclocked monitors to otherworldly arachnid routers, both of these Taiwanese companies are pushing as hard as they can to give conventional, commoditized products the veneer of a fresh attitude and personality.

The very apt comment from Sameer Singh, industry analyst at App Annie: “Predictable response when facing disruption – flee upmarket.” (The source of the disruption fits in a pocket and also makes phone calls.)
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Start up: Apple’s AI hires, Spotify’s smart music, why refugees have smartphones, and more

Posted on September 9, 2015 by charlesarthur

What’s the motive for downloading the top 40 every week from a torrent site? Completism? Photo by DigitalTribes on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Handle with care. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: Apple ups hiring, but faces obstacles to making phones smarter » Reuters

Apple has ramped up its hiring of artificial intelligence experts, recruiting from PhD programs, posting dozens of job listings and greatly increasing the size of its AI staff, a review of hiring sites suggests and numerous sources confirm.

The goal is to challenge Google in an area the Internet search giant has long dominated: smartphone features that give users what they want before they ask.

As part of its push, the company is currently trying to hire at least 86 more employees with expertise in the branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, according to a recent analysis of Apple job postings. The company has also stepped up its courtship of machine-learning PhDs, joining Google, Amazon, Facebook and others in a fierce contest, leading academics say.

But some experts say the iPhone maker’s strict stance on privacy is likely to undermine its ability to compete in the rapidly progressing field.

It’s certainly the case that Apple’s privacy stance is, as Sameer Singh says, its “strategy tax” (a strategy tax is an approach to a business area that prevents you exploiting it to the maximum: “Windows everywhere” was Microsoft’s strategy tax that prevented it doing mobile really well, Google’s is the need to collect data). The question is how much you do need that pooled personal information (as opposed to anonymous information) to do this well.
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Field Notice: FN – 63697 – Protective Boot on Certain Network Cables Might Push the Mode Button and Cause an Unexpected Reset on the 48-Port Models of Cisco Catalyst 3650 and 3850 Series Switches » Cisco

“Certain” network cables being “pretty much every Ethernet cable you buy”. Like this:

Design screwups like this deserve their own Tumblr. Of note: the Cisco 3650 was released on October 10 2013; this note is dated October 30 2013. Of course it wasn’t caught in testing, but one suspects that customers discovered this pretty much on day one.
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Inside Spotify and the future of music » Tech Insider

Alex Heath:

Spotify’s progress in sorting its library of 35 million songs can be traced back to The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company that was created within the MIT Media Lab a decade ago. Spotify bought The Echo Nest last March in what was reported to be a $100m deal.

Jim Lucchese, CEO of The Echo Nest, tells Tech Insider that his team of about 70 people are focused on delivering “the right listening experience at the right time” within Spotify.

They do this by analyzing the makeup of every song, how people are talking about music online, and how people are listening to it. While the company continues to work with clients like Rdio, Microsoft, Sirius, and Vevo, as it did before it was sold, its most cutting-edge work is developed and honed for Spotify.

One of The Echo Nest’s first projects for Spotify, reported last September on FiveThirtyEight, was developing dossiers of every user’s listening habits, which are now called “taste profiles.”

Ajay Kalia, who oversees the project, tells us they realized early on that there’s an important distinction between the music you listen to and music you actually like.

For example, just because I play a lot of instrumental, ambient music while I’m at work doesn’t mean that I have a particular affinity for those kinds of artists. And just because your significant other plays a lot of country music while you’re both in the car doesn’t mean you want a bunch of country playlists shoved at you.

This “listen to but not like” has often been the problem about music. This makes it sound as though Echo Nest is human-curated, which it really isn’t.
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Google nears re-entry to mainland China » The Information

Amir Efrati:

As part of its broader China push, Google is expected to offer new incentives to phone makers to upgrade Android phones to the latest versions of the operating system, says one person briefed on its plans. The company wants more phones to run the advanced version of Android so that the software platform and experience can be more consistent for app developers and consumers.

As more Chinese app developers look to extend their apps beyond China’s borders and more non-Chinese app makers try to tap the Chinese market, Google wants to ensure all the apps work well across Android devices globally. Thus, hardware partners that will distribute Android Wear or Google Play in China will need to adhere to certain global compatibility standards, says the person familiar with the plan.

For its app store, Google has promised authorities that it will follow local laws and block apps that the government deems objectionable, say the people familiar with Google’s plans. In some parts of the world and among Internet policy wonks, this move will be viewed as a back-tracking from Google’s posture following its departure from China in 2010. At that time Google ended its engineering operations in China and moved its Chinese-language Web-search engine to a Hong Kong-based Web domain, out of reach of mainland China officials, after being breached from a cyber attack that it linked to the Chinese government.

Authorities denied involvement in the attack, which successfully breached many American companies and is known as Operation Aurora. At the time, though, Google co-founder Sergey Brin publicly compared China to the totalitarian Soviet Union in which he grew up. (Mr. Brin is now part of Alphabet, Google’s soon-to-be parent company, and isn’t involved in Google’s day-to-day affairs.)

Some forces within Google always believed that the company’s and Mr. Brin’s response was rash. It should have viewed the China-based hacking, which occurred in late 2009, as a natural consequence of being a major tech company in an age of increasing cyber attacks by all governments.

A long extract (but it’s a long article). That last paragraph is telling; Eric Schmidt was the pro-China voice, Brin the no-to-China voice, and Larry Page effectively had the casting vote back in 2010. Sundar Pichai clearly leans towards Eric Schmidt’s stance: better to deal than to stand on principle.
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Police raid fails to dent UK Top 40 music piracy » TorrentFreak

Police arrested a Liverpudlian who was a determined uploader of the top 40 releases to torrent sites:

Yet again it appears that the arrest last week was a case of rightsholders and police targeting low-hanging fruit. Using widely available research tools we were able to quickly uncover important names plus associated addresses, both email and physical. It seems likely that he made close to no effort to conceal his identity.

Due to being in the police spotlight it will come as little surprise that there was no weekly upload of the UK’s Top 40 most-popular tracks from OldSkoolScouse last Friday, something which probably disappointed the releaser’s fans. However, any upset would have been very temporary indeed.

As shown below, at least four other releases of exactly the same content were widely available on public torrent sites within hours of the UK chart results being announced last Friday, meaning the impact on availability was almost non-existent.

But who, seriously, actually wants to listen to all the top 40 tracks week after week? It would be pretty numbing even if you worked in the business. I bet this guy barely listened to the music. He, and the downloaders who waited avidly for the songs, strike me as more like stamp collectors: uninterested in what is conveyed, obsessed with completing sets.
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iPhone supply chain makers set to see strong sales in September, say sources » Digitimes

Monica Chen and Steve Shen:

Incoming parts and components orders for the new iPhones are even stronger than orders for the iPhone 6 devices in the corresponding period of a year earlier, indicated the sources, adding that shipments of updated iPhones will once again squeeze sales of other vendors including Samsung Electronics, Sony Mobile Communications and LG Electronics, commented the sources.

Thus, sales of the new iPhones are expected to dominate smartphone sales globally in the fourth quarter of 2015 as current sales of LG Electronics’ G4, HTC’s One M9/M9+ series products and Sony Mobile’s Xperia Z3+ have been lower than expected, indicated the sources.

To lessen the impact of the release of the new iPhones, Samsung has been implementing a “Ultimate Test Drive” program that encourages current iPhone users to pay US$1 to test its Galaxy Note 5 or Galaxy S6 Edge+ for one month.

Good luck with that, Samsung.
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Academic study reveals urban and rural broadband speed gaps » ISPreview UK

Mark Jackson:

The study (‘Two-Speed Britain: Rural Internet Use‘) claims that more than 1 million people in Britain are “excluded or face challenges in engaging in normal online activities because they live in remote rural areas“, where slow or non-existent Internet connectivity is still a serious problem.

The report separated areas into several groups and examined each separately: Deep Rural (remote), Shallow Rural (less remote) and Urban internet users. It reveals that just 5% of those in Urban areas had an average broadband speed below 6.3Mbps, but in Deep Rural areas only 53% could achieve this “modest speed“.

Furthermore the gap is unsurprisingly found to be most pronounced in upland areas of Scotland, Wales and England, but also in many areas in lowland rural Britain. It affects 1.3 million people in deep rural Britain, and 9.2 million people in less remote areas with poor internet connection (or ‘shallow’ rural areas).

The report itself isn’t available for download (yet?) because neither Oxford University nor dot.rural has actually put a usable link up.
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Surprised that Syrian refugees have smartphones? Sorry to break this to you, but you’re an idiot » The Independent

James O’Malley, in somewhat straightforward mood:

So we know that Syria isn’t dirt poor and we know that there’s a lot of mobile phones: but why smartphones? Well, why not? In the West many people own desktop computers, laptops and tablets as well as smartphones. But if you had to give up many of your possessions and live on $1850/year, after clothes and food, what would you buy next? It is hard to think of a more useful thing to own than a smartphone, especially if you’re fleeing your home.

Even when utility isn’t considered, the reason Syrians are using smartphones and not old Nokia 3210s is the same reason that benefits claimants have (gasp!) “flatscreen” TVs… have you tried buying any other kind lately? Budget Android smartphones can be picked up for well under £100, and come with cameras, large screens and everything you would expect from a modern phone. As we’re now in the habit of replacing our phones with a new model every year or two the price of slightly older phones also drops significantly.

The headline certainly falls into the “no mimsy hedging here” bucket.
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Start up: iOS 9 and the BBC, AdBlock v Chrome/YouTube, Imogen Heap’s blockchain, and more

Posted on September 8, 2015 by charlesarthur

And we just happen by great good fortune to know a good source of women who aren’t wives too. Photo by James Maskell on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Tested on humans for irritancy. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Ashley Madison’s parent company secretly operated an escort website » Daily Dot

Dell Cameron:

After the details of roughly 33 million Ashley Madison accounts were posted online, the hackers responsible, known as Impact Team, leaked more than 197,000 private emails from the inbox of Noel Biderman, the former CEO of Avid Life Media (ALM), a Toronto, Canada–based company that operates the Ashley Madison site. Documents and emails contained in the trove and reviewed by the Daily Dot detail the company’s escort-related businesses.

Escorts.ca was leased in 2013 through a shell company called Pernimus Limited, which is listed among ALM’s “legal entities” on an internal company memo. According to a leaked contract, ALM leased the escort-service property from an Ontario-based company called Steeltown Marketing Inc., on Feb. 20, 2013.

The escorts.ca website was still active until roughly 6pm ET on Tuesday, when it was abruptly suspended. A version of the site from Aug. 1, 2015, can still be viewed, however, via the Wayback Machine.

Innocent explanation: ALM was into teh sexy bsns, so having an escort company as well as a “YOLO BE UNFAITHFUL” site was just consistent corporate thinking.

Malevolent explanation: 1) have a site encouraging guys to be unfaithful; 2) funnel them towards escorts 3) Profit!

Hang on, further down:

The document shows that ALM’s intention for the site, which did not charge users to browse its pages, was to funnel traffic to Ashley Madison and other ALM properties.

Having some trouble making the innocent explanation work here.

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Apple’s iOS 9: Tweaks not revolution for video, photos and audio » BBC Blogs: College of Journalism

Marc Settle, who specialises in smartphone reporting for the BBC Academy:

Doesn’t time fly. It’s already a year since my now-traditional blog post examining what’s in the latest version of iOS, the operating system on iPhones and iPads. It’s also therefore a year since the equally traditional complaint of ‘preferential treatment’ to Apple over Android, the operating system that runs on around 80% of smartphones globally.

However, it remains the case that iPhones are the device of choice for many leading news organisations around the world – not just the BBC – for their employees to gather and send broadcast-quality footage at a far lower cost than traditional methods.

It’s also the case that this review of iOS 9 will be far more relevant, far more quickly, to iPhone owners if the pattern of previous releases is repeated. iOS 8 came out on 17 September 2014; a week later it was running on more than a third of compatible devices (as shown on the graph above).

In stark contrast, the latest version of Android, called Lollipop, was released in November 2014 but nine months later it’s still barely on 20% of devices.

Seems iOS 9 doesn’t add much, apart from some little tweaks in video editing. It has been noticeable in the latest reports on the refugee crisis that some of the BBC reporters are doing the reports with iPhones; one did a whole report using the front-facing camera and flash so that he could show the extent of the problem.
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YouTube ads aren’t being blocked in Chrome / Recently Reported / Knowledge Base » AdBlock Support

And lo, there was great consternation that YouTube might have found a way to make people view ads. But it turned out not to be:

Some users have been able to confirm, that removing YouTube app from Chrome (by navigating to chrome://apps on Chrome) fixes YouTube ads, which are not blocked.

According to the EasyList forum post on this topic (you can read the original Google Code issue if you’d like to know the gory details) it’s caused by a recent Chrome security update, not the ad blockers or YouTube finding a way around the current filters.

At this point, we’re waiting for news about another update to Chrome which will fix this. In the meantime, we recommend switching to Firefox or Safari, which continue to block ads in YouTube videos just fine

In the Chromium discussion, a Chromium developer says “It was a security fix tracked in bug 510802 which we can’t make public yet, but it has the details.” (I can’t find a way to view bug 510802, so maybe it’s a doozy.)

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Michael Dell sees consolidation among PC makers in next few years » Reuters

The top three global PC makers would be able to raise market share in the next few years through consolidation amid shrinking sales of personal computers, Dell Inc chief executive Michael Dell said on Monday.

Lenovo Group Ltd tops global PC shipment ranking with a 20.3% market share, followed by Hewlett-Packard Co at 18.5% and Dell at 14.5%, according to research firm International Data Corp.

The top three companies could corner about 80% of the market in the next five to seven years, Dell said at a roundtable conference with journalists in Bengaluru, India.

“In the first half of this year, we outgrew the two in notebooks and we have grown now 10 quarters in a row,” Dell said.

IDC last month forecast PC shipments to fall 8.7% this year, steeper than its earlier estimate of a 6.2% decline, and said they are expected to return to growth in 2017.

Presently those top three have 53%; it would take quite a consolidation (such as the collapse/withdrawal of a player like Acer with 6.5% share and a smaller one like Toshiba with maybe 3% share) to reach that. But the ongoing consolidation is steady.

Read it too for Dell’s comment on smartphones.
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Imogen Heap: saviour of the music industry? » The Guardian

Jamie Bartlett on how one British artist aims to use blockchain technology to create an accountable system for buying and listening to and crediting music:

Because [Imogen] Heap now produces her own music independently she’s not contracted to release her song via the usual route. Instead, she will be placing the studio-recorded song, video, live performance and all Tiny Human-related data as files on her website, open to those developing new tech for the blockchain. All the taggable associated data that could interest fans or potential clients (film and TV, brands, other artists), such as the lyrics, photographs, the instruments she used, the musicians who played, etc (“I think I’ll add this article too,” she told me) will prove inspirational, she hopes.

Crucially, she’ll also include simple contracts, revealing under what terms the music would (ideally, as this is an experiment) be downloaded or used by third parties, such as advertisers, and how any money earned will be divided up among the creatives involved. All payment received – using crypto-currencies – will be routed to the recipients, as set out in the contract, within seconds. (It typically takes between weeks and months for royalty payments to work their way through the chain at the moment.)

It’s a long but worthwhile article. There’s a fair amount of handwaving around how it will work, though I suspect that’s just as much because really getting into the details of how the blockchain system would work might frighten the horses (as in, regular non-techie readers) too much.

And remember, MP3 started as a way to compress background music and sounds for video games.
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Premium Android hits the wall: discussion » Hacker News

Among the discussion of my post elsewhere on this blog is this anecdote:

My wife went into the EE shop (UK mobile company) recently to see what was on the market as her old Galaxy S2 was dying.

She came out with a list of six Samsung phones alone and a couple of Sonys. Is a Galaxy Alpha better than an S6? What’s a Galaxy Mini? So bewildered by the permutations that she just threw away the list and bought a second-hand Galaxy S4 on eBay. Potential sale for Samsung lost.

Android vendors might think they’re satisfying all possible market requirements but actually they’re confusing potential customers. As you say, probably easier just to go to the Apple store and choose between two.

I know anecdotes aren’t data, but I think the contrast between a plethora of choices and a couple makes a difference. Note too how few features Apple adds at each release. (Read the full discussion too.)
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Negative feedback: attack on a YouTube channel » Dell SecureWorks Security and Compliance Blog

Joe Stewart of CTU Research on how an “attack” (lots of dislikes) against a YouTube channel might have been organised via hijacked routers in Vietnam:

All it takes to bounce traffic through a vulnerable broadband modem is to know the standard administrative username/password pair used by the ISP, something trivially obtained by analysis of the device’s firmware image or even by brute force scanners. Once you can configure the modem, you can set up port forwarding and relay traffic inbound to a specific TCP port to an outside site (i.e. YouTube). This isn’t a proxy in the conventional sense, where one can arbitrarily tunnel all HTTP traffic through another IP, but it can work in essentially the same way for a single destination site.

Vietnam is certainly not the only country with this problem. A rush to create broadband infrastructure in some countries where ISP choices are limited has led to a dangerous monoculture of vulnerable router deployments. As consumer operating systems are increasingly becoming more secure against exploitation that would cause them to become part of the botnet ecosystem, we are increasingly seeing broadband routers being abused for these purposes instead.

It used to be that shonky Windows installations in developing countries were the main problem for such attacks; now it’s broadband routers in developing countries too. (Via Stefan Pause.)
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Why you hate Google’s new logo » The New Yorker

Sarah Larson:

Now Google is so smart and powerful, across so many platforms—Androids, a translation service, Chrome, Maps, Earth, self-driving cars, our collective brain—that our trust, our connection to that first thrilling moment, that gratitude and excitement, should be essential to maintain. You’d think the company would get that, and that rebranding, generally, feels suspicious. When I see that shifty new rainbow-colored “G” bookmarked on my toolbar, I recoil with mild distrust, thinking of when Philip Morris became Altria — No cigarettes here, see? Just rainbows! — or when British Petroleum suggested we think of it as Beyond Petroleum, or when the Bush Administration would name something Freedom.

Zingg! (Personally, though, I don’t like the new logo. I prefer the old one.)
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Start up: Firefox attacked, iPhone’s “3D Touch Display”?, ad folks fret on blockers, Note 5/Edge+ reviewed, and more

Posted on September 7, 2015 by charlesarthur

A drinks machine in the Soviet arcade museum. OK, back to work! Photo (and many more) by jasoneppink on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Do not feed. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Mozilla: data stolen from hacked bug database was used to attack Firefox » Ars Technica

Megan Geuss:

An attacker stole security-sensitive vulnerability information from the Mozilla’s Bugzilla bug tracking system and probably used it to attack Firefox users, the maker of the open-source Firefox browser warned Friday.

In an FAQ published (PDF) alongside Mozilla’s blog post about the attack, the company added that the loss of information appeared to stem from a privileged user’s compromised account. The user appeared to have re-used their Bugzilla account password on another website, which suffered a data breach. The attacker then allegedly gained access to the sensitive Bugzilla account and was able to “download security-sensitive information about flaws in Firefox and other Mozilla products.”

Mozilla added that the attacker accessed 185 non-public Firefox bugs, of which 53 involved “severe vulnerabilities.” Ten of the vulnerabilities were unpatched at the time, while the remainder had been fixed in the most recent version of Firefox at the time.

Publishing the FAQ as a PDF is a bit crummy – makes it harder to process. Reuse of passwords is a big problem but you wouldn’t expect someone with high-level access to Bugzilla to do it.
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iPhone 6s to have ‘3D Touch’ three-level, next-gen Force Touch interface » 9to5Mac

Mark Gurman, so we should trust it, right?

One of the cornerstone features of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, to be announced next Wednesday, is a screen based on the Force Touch technology from the latest MacBook trackpads and the Apple Watch. However, as we noted in previous articles such as our event expectations roundup from yesterday, the Force Touch feature in the new iPhones will actually be a next-generation version of the technology. According to sources familiar with the new iPhones, the new pressure-sensitive screen will likely be called the “3D Touch Display”…

Sounds like a bit of a clunky name?
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The alternate universe of Soviet arcade games » Atlas Obscura

Kristin Winet:

When you walk into the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games in St. Petersburg, the first thing you’ll see is a series of gray, hard-edged soda machines from the early 1980s. If you choose the one in the middle, it will dispense a tarragon-flavored and slightly fermented soda whose recipe relies on a syrup that has not been mass produced since the fall of the Soviet Union. It tastes not unlike a mix of molasses and breath mints.

All around us are beeps, pings, and shot blasts coming from rickety old machines that seem like they’ve time-traveled from the golden era of American arcade games. And yet, everything’s in Russian, we’re using kopecks as currency, and there is no Donkey Kong here.

This is not your typical museum. For one thing, everything is not only touchable, but playable. Designed to look like a 1980s USSR video game arcade, the museum is filled with restored games carefully modeled after those in Japan and the West and manufactured to the approval of the Cold War-era Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev…

…“The fact that some of these products are in danger of disappearing is why they are beloved,” says Dr. Steven Norris, a Professor of History at Miami University in Ohio who specializes in Russian and post-Soviet studies. “Nostalgia for the video games of the 1970s and 1980s is part of a larger nostalgia for Soviet consumer products of late socialism.”

Fabulous journalism bringing us a view of the world we’d not otherwise get. And of course in Soviet Russia, arcade games play you.
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DirectLinks » Canisbos

This [Safari] extension circumvents certain techniques used by Google and Facebook to track link clicks.

When you click a link in Google search results, Google uses JavaScript to replace the actual link with an indirect one, which they use for click tracking. Google then redirects the browser to the actual destination after logging the click. DirectLinks disables the JavaScript that replaces real links with indirect ones, so that when you click a search result link, Safari goes straight to the destination.

The extension does something similar for links in Facebook posts: it removes JavaScript that Facebook uses to track clicks on these links.

Probably won’t be long before this is incorporated into content blockers for iOS 9. It’s super-annoying to try to copy a link off Google and get a bunch of obfuscated Javascript.
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IAB surveys options to fight ad blockers, including lawsuits » Advertising Age

Tim Peterson:

To catch up with the growing issue, the IAB [Interactive Advertising Bureau] hosted a member leadership summit on July 9 at the IAB Ad Lab in New York City that convened the IAB and IAB Tech Lab boards as well as a number of sales and technology executives to discuss ad blocking. “It was more of an educational [meeting] to get the options on the table,” [Scott] Cunningham [senior VP at IAB and general manager of its Technology Lab] said.

Some of the options put on the table were a lot stronger than some of the more Pollyanna-ish calls for better ads or publisher appeals asking people to turn off their ad blockers as ways to fight ad blockers.

“I advocated for the top 100 websites to, beginning on the same day, not let anybody with ad blockers turned on [to view their content],” said Mr. Moore. He said that the other IAB members in attendance considered it “a good idea but the possibility of pulling it off slim.”

That might not even be the most drastic option the IAB and its members are considering. The possibility of suing the ad-blocking companies is being explored.

The ad blockers “are interfering with websites’ ability to display all the pixels that are part of that website, arguably there’s some sort of law that prohibits that,” Mr. Moore said. “I’m not by any means a lawyer, but there is work being done to explore whether in fact that may be the case.”

“interfering with websites’ ability to display all the pixels that are part of that website”. I’m not going to laug…HAHAHAHAHA.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I think we’re on No.2. Progress still to be made.

Still, there is good news: the IAB officially adopted HTML5 as the new standard for display ads, replacing Flash.
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How to write a great error message » Medium

Thomas Fuchs:

Imagine being in an office. In your cubicle. You’ve worked long hours this week for an upcoming product introduction. You’re tired and cranky, and you just want the weekend to finally arrive.

But first you have to try if the homepage for the new product works fine on Windows 10. No problem, you think, your trusty Mac laptop has software installed that allows you to run Windows.

You fire up the software, and when Windows politely asks you to update with several intrusive notifications, you say, sure, go ahead.

And then you see this.

That would be almost amusing, if it wasn’t for the deadline for the product.

Terrific article. (Via Dave Verwer’s iOS Dev Weekly. You should try it.)
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Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and S6 edge+ review: pretty much exactly what you’d expect » Android Police

David Ruddock, who has been doing some terrific work at Android Police, has a great review with this conclusion:

So, should you buy these phones? I mean, that really comes down to the criteria they don’t meet for you, not what they do. Because these devices really are the technical pinnacle of the smartphones currently out there, a given person’s lack of interest in them is going to almost certainly come down to price, philosophy, or a particular missing feature or other perceived weakness (such as the absent microSD slot or a lack of stock Android). Make no mistake: these are excellent phones. But is excellence worth this much money, especially when the pitfalls (subpar battery life, slow updates, and performance hiccups) mirror or sometimes even exceed those of devices costing potentially much less? That’s for you, the consumer, to decide. If you’re asking me, the flash isn’t worth the cash – Samsung’s premium phones today are much more about brand image and fashion than they are user empowerment or choice.

The comments also show that Samsung users are… animated about the absence of SD cards/removable batteries, battery life, price, the “why upgrade?” question and app performance.
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HTC: from riches to rags » Counterpoint Technology Market Research

Neil Shah analyses HTC’s position, where its August revenues were the lowest for 10 years – and there’s no sign of improvement:

Being a pure hardware only vendor won’t take HTC far enough. HTC should learn from another Taiwanese company Asus how it is making a comeback and scaling up with cutting edge specs at highly affordable price-points.

Similarly, Motorola as well following Xiaomi’s footsteps selling online in many markets its highly attractive offering in form of Moto X/G/E at affordable price-points and charting phenomenal comeback.

If this doesn’t work, a potential merger or getting acquired is the only way the company can return value to its shareholders and think about growing with other company.

However, for that HTC at least for short- to mid-term will need to raise its game, make itself attractive to others.

HTC should focus on building an IP portfolio over the next couple of years and eventually maximize its valuation. Merging with other Taiwanese companies such as Acer or Asus to justify scale could also be a possible strategy.

HTC’s Cher Wang seems unwilling to countenance a takeover, but she might have to consider it seriously pretty soon.
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BlackBerry to acquire Good Technology: executive point of view » Inside BlackBerry

BlackBerry is spending $425m of its not-growing cash pile to buy Good, which has been a bitter rival for more than a decade. Inside BlackBerry lobbed some soft questions at BlackBerry COO Marty Beard and Good CEO Christy Wyatt, but not all the answers were quite that gentle:

IBB: Speaking of customers, how does this impact each of your existing customers and what new areas will come of it?

MB: Our acquisition of Good will mean the end of compromise for customers. We will be able to provide even stronger cross-platform capabilities – ensuring customers won’t have to make any sacrifices in operating systems, deployment models, or any level of privacy and security in their mobile environments. I truly believe that combined, BlackBerry and Good will raise the bar in the enterprise mobility market, enabling our customers to be more productive and protecting their sensitive data across all of their mobile end points.

CW: Historically, when a customer chooses their enterprise mobility platform, they have been asked to make tough choices: do they want deep management, deep security, a great user experience or enterprise scalability? The truth is that customers should not have to choose. They will need different tools to solve different mobility challenges. With this combination, customers can have the best in security, management, ecosystem and experiences all on a common platform.

I love how they’re both needling about each others’ products, but now saying that ach, it’s all good. This is a smart acquisition by BlackBerry; now it needs to make it work.
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Start up: design for cars and Xbox 360s, the rural broadband row, is Huawei Samsung v2?, hacking OSX, and more

Posted on September 4, 2015 by charlesarthur

A magnetic wormhole! Really exists! Looks nothing like this! Photo by w4nd3rl0st on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google self-driving cars don’t need windshield wipers » Mashable

Chris Perkins:

When asked if the car had windshield wipers, a Google employee replied, “Yes, but not on the windshield. They’re on our sensors—our car’s ‘eyes.'” Essentially, the Google car doesn’t have windshield wipers because it doesn’t need them.

Let that sink in for a second.

The ultimate goal of an autonomous car is to be, well, fully autonomous. A self-driving car wouldn’t require any human input other than specifying a destination. A self-driving car wouldn’t require any human input other than specifying a destination. To that end, Google’s self-driving prototype doesn’t have windshield wipers because humans aren’t required to see out of it.

This brave new world of “cars” truly aren’t cars as we understand them. Yes, they have four wheels and take people from point A to point B, but the similarities end there. If humans don’t need to drive these cars, a very different approach to design is allowed.

Listened to John Gruber and Ben Thompson on the Talk Show earlier. Electric cars, one pointed out, are effectively computers on wheels; you no longer need expertise in pistons and cylinder heads to make a car. That changes the landscape.
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How the Red Ring of Death problem happened » Business Insider

Robbie Bach, formerly of Microsoft, has written a book about his time there. Ben Gilbert picks up what happened that led to a billion-dollar cost:

With the Xbox 360, Microsoft took a design-first approach. Here’s how Bach describes it:

We started with design at the front of the process, and we said, ‘This has to be designed with a designer’s sensibility.’ So the enclosure work we did was done relatively early. Not locked in stone, but we have a shell under which we want to fit. So then the engineering team goes and puts things in the shell.

More clearly: Microsoft designed the look of the Xbox 360 and then figured out how to fit the console’s guts inside, which can be risky. Though game consoles are designed to be pretty enough for a living room home theater, their design is also based on heat management. These things are basically computers. If you pack a computer in a tight box, it will eventually overheat.

Worse, it might loosen parts of the system’s internals or cause other havoc.

Microsoft had run the console through various tests, from heat to longevity to cold to movement, and plenty of others, and the Red Ring of Death problem was apparently something they didn’t come across. It was only when consoles started coming in as returns that Microsoft began to see the scope of the issue.

“Design is how it works, not how it looks”, allegedly. Though Apple has had problems with iBooks in the past, where heat-related issues led to some failures. But not a billion dollars worth.
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June 2015: MPs set up rural broadband all-party Parliamentary group to tackle BT » ISPreview UK

Mark Jackson:

A group of MPs, primarily from Devon and Somerset in England’s South West, have established a new All-Party Parliamentary Group that will investigate the roll-out of superfast broadband (24Mbps+) services. The group also intends to “put pressure” on BT to stop the operators alleged “delaying antics” and be more transparent with their coverage plans.

It’s understood that the group’s formation was sparked last week after 50 MPs from the South West gathered to moan about progress in the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme, which aims to make fixed line superfast broadband services available to 95% of the UK by 2017/18.

The new group will be chaired by Ian Liddell-Grainger MP and has support from Rebecca Pow MP and Neil Parish MP among others. Unfortunately the Government’s register of APPG’s hasn’t been updated since March 2015 (here) and as such the details are still a bit thin on the ground.

Might there be some progress now MPs are about to come back into session?
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Why the smartwatch hype machine is running five years fast » Bloomberg Business

Amy Thomson:

Here’s why you probably want a smartwatch: You can use it to do cool stuff like open doors, pay for coffee, and start cars. Here’s why you probably won’t buy one for another five years or so: There still aren’t many doors, stores, or cars that your smartwatch will work with.

At the IFA electronics show in Berlin this week, Samsung Electronics, Lenovo Group and Huawei unveiled updated watches with upgraded features like tap-to-pay and the ability to interact with other devices ranging from your cell phone to your thermostat to your minivan.

The stumbling block is that it will take several years before there are enough sensors in homes, businesses and vehicles to make it worth the trouble to strap on a smartwatch.

“For watches to become more popular and more mainstream, they have to deliver a number of capabilities to be relevant,” said Andy Griffiths, head of Samsung’s UK and Ireland division. “Our expected timeline is out to 2020.”

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Magnetic wormhole created for first time » UAB Barcelona

The researchers used metamaterials and metasurfaces to build the tunnel experimentally, so that the magnetic field from a source, such as a magnet or a an electromagnet, appears at the other end of the wormhole as an isolated magnetic monopole. This result is strange enough in itself, as magnetic monopoles – magnets with only one pole, whether north or south – do not exist in nature. The overall effect is that of a magnetic field that appears to travel from one point to another through a dimension that lies outside the conventional three dimensions.

The wormhole in this experiment is a sphere made of different layers: an external layer with a ferromagnetic surface, a second inner layer, made of superconducting material, and a ferromagnetic sheet rolled into a cylinder that crosses the sphere from one end to the other. The sphere is made in such a way as to be magnetically undetectable – invisible, in magnetic field terms – from the exterior.

The magnetic wormhole is an analogy of gravitational ones, as it “changes the topology of space, as if the inner region has been magnetically erased from space”, explains Àlvar Sánchez, the lead researcher.

That last sentence has a new use of the word “explains”. Potential applications already exist for MRIs etc.
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HTML5 deck of cards » Github

That’s it, really. Code available on Github. Neat.
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Huawei is the new Samsung » The Verge

As in it’s a “fast follower” (read: mimic), argues Vlad Savov. But he notes that it does it more subtly than Samsung did:

When Huawei takes risks on rumored new features, as it is doing with Force Touch, it does so in a limited manner. The Force Touch version of the Mate S will only be available in certain markets — mainly the ones where you can say “Force Touch” without being immediately slapped down by Apple’s lawyers — so whatever extra cost there is to adding it in can be borne even if it doesn’t stimulate any extra sales. But then, the Mate S has already stirred up hype and discussion by following Apple’s lead so closely and obviously. Even if you never buy a Force Touch Mate S, you’re now better aware of it because of that Apple analogy.

Samsung knew this better than anyone else: biting the heels of the top dog is a great way to get noticed. And if you happen to have a well-priced, technically appealing product, you can convert that hype into sales. Huawei has been chasing the hype with unquenchable thirst, and by grabbing all the best ideas it sees in the market, it’s been delivering those technically proficient devices to make it prosperous. It’s no accident that Huawei is the third-biggest smartphone vendor in the world. The Chinese company combines the best of what’s available and sells it at a lower price — which it can afford to do because it only needs to spend on engineering. The innovative ideas are already out there waiting to be plucked. It might not be fair, but it sure is effective.

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Researchers discover new keychain vulnerability in OSX » CSO Online

Steve Ragan:

The command creates a situation where, instead of asking for a user’s Keychain password, Keychain will prompt them to click an allow button instead. The two researchers then took their theory further and developed a proof-of-concept exploit that triggers the command and simulates a user mouse click in the exact location where the allow button would appear.

This process happens in milliseconds (less than 200ms to be exact), right in front of the user, who wouldn’t notice a thing.

“The ‘allow’ button appears 10% to the right of the centre of the screen and 7% below it,” Jebara said in an email.

“We noticed that the only issue that could affect the location of this ‘allow’ button is the size of the dock, so we also issue a command that hides the dock for 500ms in order for us to successfully press the ‘allow’ button.”

After the allow button is pressed, the password is intercepted and sent via SMS to the attacker’s phone. However, SMS could be replaced by any delivery system, including exfiltration to a C&C server, or it could be stored locally for later retrieval.

This seems to use the Accessibility API – but I didn’t think that was automatically enabled on OSX. A subtle and dangerous flaw.
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Sony – Plethora of pixels » Radio Free Mobile

Richard Windsor on Sony’s 806 pixels-per-inch Xperia Z5 Premium:

the 4K is screen is, in my opinion, fairly useless for a number of reasons.
• First. In order to see the difference between this screen and a 1080p device the user will have to hold the device between 5-8 inches from his eyes. The viewing distance of most smartphones is around 9-12 inches meaning that in most use cases, users will not be able to tell the difference.
• Second. There is no content available for it meaning that everything has to be up-scaled by a graphics processor to display correctly on the screen. Historically, the Japanese companies have been by far the best at upscaling technologies, but there is still a significant risk that most content and apps will not display optimally.
• Third. Even compressed using VP9 or H.265, 4K video takes up far more space than 1080p and requires up to 4x the bandwidth to be transmitted.

Consequently, users will be able to store less content on their devices and incur up to 4x the cost and 4x the wait to view content that in most cases will look no better than 1080p.
However, despite the practical limitations of a 4K smartphone, it is well known that pointless gimmicks sell phones.

Not so sure about that last point. This is a classic spec-war move; Sony is constrained in what it can do with software, so it has a meaningless spec. (And there’s no suggestion so far of using it in VR, unlike the Note 4, though Sony does have a VR project called Morpheus.)
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Start up: Huawei’s ambition, HTC R+D layoffs, 3D copyright, Google’s odd war on app ads, and more

Posted on September 3, 2015 by charlesarthur

But not with “Google Here”, thank you. Photo by x-ray delta one on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Still nothing about logos. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

FTC settles with Machinima for paying YouTube influencers to endorse Xbox One » GamesBeat | Games | by Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi:

According to the FTC’s complaint, Machinima and its influencers were part of an Xbox One marketing campaign managed by Microsoft’s advertising agency, Starcom MediaVest Group. Machinima guaranteed Starcom that the influencer videos receive at least 19 million times.

In a statement, Machinima said, “Machinima is actively and deeply committed to ensuring transparency with all of its social influencer campaigns. Through collaboration with the FTC, we are pleased to have firmly resolved this matter, related to an incident that occurred in 2013, prior to Machinima’s change of management in March 2014. We hope and expect that the agreement we have reached today will set standards and best practices for the entire industry to follow to ensure the best consumer experience possible.”

In the first phase of the marketing campaign, a small group of influencers received access to prerelease versions of the Xbox One console and video games in order to produce and upload two endorsement videos each. According to the FTC, Machinima paid two of these endorsers $15,000 and $30,000 for producing You Tube videos that garnered 250,000 views and 730,000 views, respectively.

After that, Machinima promised to pay a larger group of influencers $1 for every 1,000 video views, up to a total of $25,000. Machinima did not require any of the influencers to disclose they were being paid for their endorsement.

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Huawei chips away at Samsung » WSJ

Juro Osawa:

For the past three years, Samsung Electronics Co. has been the world’s top seller of smartphones, but its global lead is now under attack from fast-growing Chinese rival Huawei Technologies Co.

Long known as a telecommunications-equipment supplier to global carriers, Huawei has already toppled Samsung in China, the world’s biggest market, where 425 million smartphones are expected to be shipped this year. Globally, the Shenzhen-based company became the third-largest smartphone maker in the second quarter, according to data from IDC. This is due, in part, to its ability to gain market share in the Middle East and Africa, where smartphone growth exceeds that of any other region.

With handset revenue up 87% in the first half of this year, Huawei expects profit from its smartphone business to more than double this year. If its pace of growth continues, Huawei hopes to challenge top competitors Samsung and Apple in the smartphone market.

Huawei doesn’t (yet?) break out its handset profits. It’s aiming to ship 109m smartphones this year – a weirdly precise figure – having shifted 47m in the first half, so 62m to go. Apple sold 192m phones in 2014, and 109m in the first half of this year, so the challenge might take a little while yet.

Cleverly, it introduced a phone with a “Force Touch”-style capability at IFA on Wednesday; it showed it estimating the weight of an orange resting on the screen. Not an apple?

The biggest challenge will be teaching non-Chinese how to say the name (Hoo-waa-way).
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Chinese mobe market suffers pre-pwned Android pandemic » The Register

G DATA found that more than two dozen phones from different manufacturers were already compromised straight out of the box.

Kit from manufacturers including Huawei, Lenovo and Xiaomi have pre-installed espionage functions in the firmware. G DATA suspects that middlemen modified the device software to steal user data and inject their own advertising to earn money.

Other possibilities include unintentional infection through compromised devices in the supply chain (a problem which affected Vodafone Spain back in 2010) or intentional interference by government spies. Many of the models implicated in the malfeasance sell well in China.

The pre-pwned device issue has become a perennial problem for privacy-conscious smartphone users. Sticking to the Play Store, avoiding dodgy websites and following common-sense security precautions are no help in such cases.

If the phones got to G DATA then it seems unlikely to have been the Chinese government, non? More like middlemen seeking cash for ads.
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HTC to lay off 600 employees working in Taiwan » Digitimes

Trevor Huang and Steve Shen:

About 400 out of the more than 9,000 employees currently at HTC’s headquarters in Taoyuan will be laid off, confirmed the Taoyuan City Government, which has received the layoff plan from HTC. The 400 employees include production line works, R&D and backup personnel.

The New Taipei City Government also confirmed that it had received a notification from HTC about discharging 200 workers at its Xindian plant by the end of October. Those who will lose their jobs at the Xindian plant, which has a total of 2,912 employees, are mostly R&D personnel.

Cutting R+D staff seems like an obvious thing to do when finances are tight, but tends to leave you with nothing to go forward with when – if – you emerge from the squeeze.
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Apple receiving G/G touch samples for 2016 iPhone » Digitimes

Siu Han and Alex Wolfgram:

Makers have already begun sending samples of fully laminated G/G technology to Apple and Corning along with Asahi Glass have also reportedly sent glass samples.

Market observers have recently noted that Apple is in discussions over whether to go back to G/G instead of in-cell technology for future iPhone devices as in-cell technology is currently struggling with various production bottlenecks that are preventing Apple from adding new features as well as increasing resolutions. As a result, touch panel makers are aiming to create G/G touch panels that would allow Apple to create smartphones similar in thickness to current iPhones equipped with in-cell touch panels.

G/G touch panels may also help Apple develop bezel-free smartphones as in-cell touch panels reportedly are struggling with touch sensitivity on the edges. Additionally, in-cell touch panels also make it difficult for vendors to pursue higher resolutions including Ultra HD (4K) due to current bottlenecks, the observers said.

Tells you something about what Apple might have planned for 2016. Incremental steps every time.
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What happened to the Readymake: Duchamp chess pieces? » Scott Kildall

Kildall and Bryan Cera had scanned these very rare pieces and uploaded the scanned files to Thingiverse, a site for sharing Makerbot 3D printing files:

The answer is that we ran into an unexpected copyright concern. The Marcel Duchamp Estate objected to the posting of our reconstructed 3D files on Thingiverse, claiming that our project was an infringement of French intellectual property law. Although the copyright claim never went to legal adjudication, we decided that it was in our best interests to remove the 3D-printable files from Thingiverse – both to avoid a legal conflict, and to respect the position of the estate.

Disputes like this might become commonplace if 3D printing really breaks through.
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Beautiful New Designs for Full-Screen In-App Ads » Inside Google AdWords blog

Pasha Nahass, product manager:

Nearly 60% of smartphone users expect their favorite apps to look visually appealing. We’ve always believed that in-app ads can enhance an app’s overall experience by being well designed. So today we’re announcing a completely new look for our interstitial in-app ad formats – also known as full-screen ads – that run on apps in the AdMob network and DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Ah. So let’s walk through this.
• Full-screen interstitials for apps from mobile search results = bad, attracting search ranking penalties
• Full-screen AdWord ads inside existing apps = good. Especially if, as this post suggests, you use the full-screen interstitials for a mobile app install campaign.

On Twitter, this was described to me as “just don’t block the front door [from search] with an interstitial.” Which makes sense; if you’re already inside the app, you’re less likely to bounce away from a full-page ad.
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Silk Road case: US agent investigating dark web drug site admits to $800,000 Bitcoin theft » City A.M.

Clara Guiborg:

Former secret service agent Shaun Bridges has pleaded guilty to Bitcoin theft, admitting to sending over $800,000 worth of the digital currency to his personal account while he was investigating the dark web drug trafficking site.

Silk Road was shut down in the autumn of 2013, having netted Bitcoin sales of over $200m of drugs and other illegal items during its two years of operations. The site’s founder, Ross Ulbricht, who went by the alias “Dread Pirate Roberts”, was sentenced to life imprisonment during a highly-publicised case.

But the investigation itself led to further illicit uses of Bitcoin.

Bridges is the second US federal agent to have fallen foul of Bitcoin theft temptation during the investigation, after former agent Carl Force pleaded guilty to this just two months ago.

Did they think that bitcoins were untraceable? Strange.
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Almost no one sided with #GamerGate: a research paper on the internet’s reaction to last year’s mob » Superheroes in Racecars

Livio de la Cruz is a program manager at Microsoft, and has done an exhaustive study on coverage and reactions of Gamergate:

The Week compared GamerGate to a soccer team that has only ever managed to score on its own goal and responds with self-congratulatory remarks on a job well done. Their efforts to silence feminist and political critique of games actually ended up inspiring more of it. Their efforts to convince journalists to stop critiquing gamers for their sexist, bigoted behavior has only amplified people’s awareness of society’s misogyny problem. Their efforts to discredit Zoe Quinn, Leigh Alexander, Anita Sarkeesian, and Brianna Wu have led to them becoming some of the most respected voices in games, as more people are inspired by their work against abuse and their advancement of the medium itself. Their efforts to scare women out of the games industry actually led to more money, time, and talent being dedicated towards fixing tech’s diversity problem.

Before GamerGate, people might have had a rough idea of how diversity in teams was good for companies and how online harassment was maybe a problem that needed to be fixed. But now I suspect that people’s thought processes tend to go like this: Why do we need diversity in tech? Because of GamerGate. Why do need to fix online harassment? Because of GamerGate. Why is feminism so important? Because: GamerGate.

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Windows 10 first month worldwide usage well ahead of that recorded by Windows 8 » StatCounter Global Stats

In its first calendar month since launch, Windows 10 worldwide usage share far exceeds that of Windows 8 in the same time period, according to independent web analytics company StatCounter. Its analytics arm, StatCounter Global Stats finds that Windows 10 level of usage after one month also exceeds that recorded by Windows 7.

StatCounter conducted a special analysis of the take up of Edge by Windows 10 users. It found that Edge usage on Windows 10 peaked at 20.1% on 30th July, the day after the global launch, but fell back to 14.1% on the 31st August.

Easy to explain that dropoff: people went back to work on the August Monday (it wasn’t a holiday in the US), stopped using their Windows 10-updated machines at home, and used the old-OS machines at work. The peak in July is probably explained in the same way – people were on holiday.

Remarkable what happens when you force-upgrade peoples’ machines for free.
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Google shut down a secret Google Maps project called ‘Google Here’ » Fortune

Nice scoop by Erin Griffith:

The product was called Google Here, according to a document obtained by Fortune that describes the project’s specifications. The effort spanned multiple departments and was led by Dan Cath, a strategic partner manager, and the Google Maps team. The launch included partnerships with retailers, including Starbucks SBUX -2.03% . Had it launched, Google Here would have been available to more than 350 million Android users by early 2015, with plans to support iOS later in the year.

But people familiar with the project say it was shut down for two reasons: Google Here was potentially too invasive, and the company wasn’t sure if many retailers would want it. (Not helping matters, Nokia has used the name “Here” for its own mapping service.) A Google spokesman declined to comment.

Google Here worked by sending a notification to a smartphone user’s lock screen within five seconds of their entering a partner’s location. If the user clicked on the notification, a full screen HTLM5 “app” experience would launch. Google Here would know when to send the notification via Google Maps and beacons placed in the stores of participating partners. Google planned to supply the beacons to partners for the launch, according to the document. The experience could also be found by going to the Google Maps app.

Too invasive? Probably more likely retailers weren’t prepared to put the money in for an unclear return, since it would be permission-based (and hence isn’t really that invasive).
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